1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a system and method for multimedia decoding, and more particularly to a system and method for finding out a start position of a frame header of a multimedia sequence.
2. Description of the Related Art
MPEG-1 defines a group of Audio and Video (AV) coding and compression standards agreed upon by MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group). MPEG-1, Audio Layer 3 is the popular audio format known as MP3. As cheaper and more powerful consumer decoding hardware became available, more advanced formats such as MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 were developed. These newer formats are more complex and require more powerful hardware, but the formats also achieve greater coding efficiency.
Typically, an MP3 file is made up of multiple MP3 frames, which consist of the MP3 header and the MP3 data. This sequence of frames is called an elementary stream. Frames are independent items: one can cut the frames from a file and an MP3 player would be able to play it. The MP3 header contains the information of encoding scheme (e.g. encoding version, sampling rate, and bitrate), and the MP3 data is the actual audio payload. However, lengths of each frame may not be fixed because of the variety of encoding bitrates, or others, lengths of each frame of the MP3 file for subsequent decoding is required to be determined.